adrian holovaty

August 30, 2002, 10:54 PM ET

Confusing breadcrumb navigation

Following up on my previous post, which lauded Computerworld.com's intuitive URL and breadcrumb navigation scheme...

Well. It seems many of the Computerworld.com pages have duplicated terms in their breadcrumb navigation. For example:

Home > Topics > Development > Development > Application Development

In this case, development is a subcategory of none other than...Development. Does this make any sense to anybody? If I'm reading that story and I want to get back to the Development page, which link do I click? Believe it or not, they do not reference the same page. It's obvious that having two levels of the same keyword is entirely nonsensical.

More examples: Security, Hardware, Software.

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August 30, 2002, 10:37 PM ET

URLs and breadcrumb navigation working together

I was at Computerworld.com the other day when I noticed the site's elegant and usable URL/breadcrumb navigation schemes. In a Web full of gibberish URLs (such as this example), "smart" and hackable URLs are always a breath of fresh air.

On Computerworld.com, the URLs are written in plain English and convey a hierarchy -- for example, computerworld.com / departments / management / casestudies gets you to the "Case studies" page of the Management section, which is a subsection of Departments. Beautiful. When I loaded that page, I instantly knew where I was within the site tree.

And as if that weren't enough, Computerworld.com uses supplementary breadcrumb navigation that, on most content pages, echoes the URL word-for-word. Thus, in the above "Case studies" example, you'll see "Home > Departments > Management > Case Studies". This is an example to follow. (And it's very easy to do with Apache's mod_rewrite, which, in fact, I use on this very site.)

On a related note, I came across a good kuro5hin discussion on this topic, which linked to this smart-URLed version of the King James Bible. The Electric King James Bible, as it's called, lets you type a book, chapter and verse in the URL to get the respective Bible passage, like so: http://bible.conman.org/kj/Exodus.20:3-17. What a brilliant idea! There has to be an application for news sites here somewhere. Perhaps, to follow up on my recent post about easy-to-remember permanent links, a site might try something like this: newssite.com/us-china-trade/monday-wednesday might get you a page of all the stories about U.S.-China trade that were published between last Monday and Wednesday, inclusive.

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August 30, 2002, 11:51 AM ET

Friday's links, and thoughts on table-based layouts

It's been a big week in browsers. We had a new Mozilla release Tuesday, and yesterday the final release of Netscape 7 was released.

American Journalism Review: Local TV management should get serious about the Web. They should also get serious about Web design; a lot of TV news sites leave much to be desired. (See this old site review.)

Jonathan Dube of CyberJournalist.net asked me to write a short piece on the making of the AJC Nursing Home Guide. That piece was posted online last night.

The influential Jeffrey Zeldman, author of To Hell With Bad Browsers, yesterday wrote that he finds table-based layouts acceptable, mostly because bad browsers haven't quite made it to hell yet:

When a popular current browser with otherwise good support for CSS chokes on something as basic as "float," and when millions still use 4.0 browsers (not always by choice), transitional XHTML layouts that include some table-driven formatting feel more and more like a reasonable choice.

My two cents: If content remains accessible in all browsers -- that's a must -- I still believe in advocating tableless, all-CSS layouts.

There are just too many benefits. I'm willing to live with having a site look plain in Netscape 4 because I believe Web users are more interested in obtaining information than being wowed by nice design. (The exceptions are sites that exist to wow the eye, such as photo blogs, promo sites for bands, or design/art sites.) An important distinction: I'm not saying users don't care whether things look pretty. Rather, they value the information itself more than the look of it. If a site is fundamentally easy to use, and uses proper HTML structure, it can get away with looking plain in old browsers.

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